Summer 2019 (Cumulative)

Upon returning to Shinjuku that night, I took a bit of a detour and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. This city-owned skyscraper has an observatory that’s (be still my beating heart) FREE! I went to the top and saw the city of Tokyo at night. This picture is highlighted by airplanes lined up to land at one of the airports, Haneda (the place I’d fly out of two days hence).

Nice view of the town. Shinjuku station is bottom left and Tokyo Tower can sort of be seen a little to the right.

The next day, I travelled up to the mountains on the north coast of Japan. I followed a popular path called the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route utilizing many forms of transportation to move through the mountains of Japan. In total I took a train, slower train, inclined railway, bus, tunnel trolley bus (which they were very excited about, but seemed like a normal electric bus to me), ropeway (cablecar), walk across a dam, bus through a mountain, another bus, and finally a train. The journey had some great views.

At the top of one of the mountains, we stopped at a place called Murodo. This is a spot at 3000m high that has some incredible views of the surrounding mountains. Tremendous views, that is, if it isn’t totally covered in fog. There were some area closed off because the volcanic vents were pumping out a little too much gas. Smelled a little like rotting eggs. Probably a nice place for hot springs.

There were a few nice views when the clouds (that we were firmly in the middle of) broke for a moment.

This would probably be an incredible reflection shot...alas!

I had planned on doing a hike to the top of a mountain (you can see the path in this photo). Since all I would see is more fog, and the snow was tough to move on - I decided against it.

In spring, this spot features snow walls nearly 20 meters high (that’s a five story building!). Of course, by July - most of the snow has melted. It’s a very popular thing to check out in late April!

Beautiful views as we descended below the clouds down to the Kurobe Dam.

Final crazy bit of transport.

The Kurobe Dam is the tallest dam in Japan. The scale of this thing is hard to get your head around. It takes about 10 minutes at a good pace to walk across the top of the dam! The dam also shoots out two massive plumes of water.

It’d be sort of fun (and terrifying) to climb down the ladders mounted into the structure.

There was even a dam museum!

The amount of water shooting out was hard to fathom. I sure hope it’s intentional...

On the way back, I stopped by the town of Matsumoto. As the alternative was to pack for my flight home, I had a bit of an explore. This is the Matsumoto Castle.

Another artsy view of the Matsumoto Castle.

I was heading back to the station as I did need to catch a train back to Tokyo (I’m nowhere near Tokyo at this point!) when I saw a bunch of stuff happening down the road. Turns out that there was this random little festival happening on a Wednesday night at temple/shrine/something. Not sure what was going on, but I did check it out (and had some fun Japanese festival food! It seemed to be some sort of children’s festival (as there were a ton of little kids, including some in traditional kimonos - quite cute!).

Shinjuku. It’s packed with people pretty much every night. Thankfully, my hotel was a block or two away from the total craziness.

Cool looking dam.

Thursday was my final day of my ridiculous Summer Trip. I was to fly out at 4pm or so. I decided to go to a local aquarium that I read some good things about and was close to a station nearby the airport. The Aqua Park had a neat jellyfish exhibit.

I thought this was a nice shot of penguin. Those quick buggers are tough to photograph!

These little worm things were crazy! They’d move in and out of sand and chomp at things from time to time. Sort of creepy! Think about these guys next time you walk around in the water at the beach.

One of the reasons I went to the aquarium was that I heard they had a cool dolphin show. I’m a sucker for sea monsters flipping and doing tricks and stuff!

Possibly the coolest part of the show as the water falling from the ceiling. The aquarium had a precision controlled system for shooting down which meant that they could make all kinds of shapes out of the falling water. They could even spell words and numbers out. I was fascinated by this technology. Gotta figure out some way to convince my church that we need this for the Youth Program somehow...

I thought the lady surfing on the dolphin was quite impressive!

Dolphin madness! It was a pretty fun show. The reason no one was sitting in the bottom rows is that it turns out that not many people want to get soaked by a splashing sea demon at noon.

They had a cool glass tunnel thing. Again, nothing totally unique, but it was a fun little outing.

And with that, my time overseas was over and I jetted away. Okay, I wasn’t actually in this plane...but it was the flight that I did take, just two days earlier (and yes, I know how to track this stuff...doesn’t everyone!).

What a time! While it was a lot of time and a LOT of money, it was an incredible experience I will never forget.
Traveling internationally can be expensive, hard, frustrating, and scary at times - but it’s so worth it. There’s a lot of world out there beyond the 20 miles around your house and your favorite Florida beach hangout. Traveling has allowed me to stretch myself in ways that I never could at home.

I loved this trip - time to start planning the next one!